Transcripts
1. Overview & Welcome: Hello and welcome to my WordPress website masterclass. My name is dominant in this, in this class, I'm going to teach you how to build a self-hosted WordPress website from scratch. I'm going to assume that you know nothing and like me, you're not that technical of a person. There's gonna be no coding, no CSS, no HTML. So if you're not a coder, don't worry, you'll still be able to build this website. Now, I use my websites as an affiliate marketer, but you can use this website for any purpose that you choose. You can use this website is an online presence for your offline business. You can use it as an e-commerce store. You can use it as an affiliate site like I do use it as a personal blog. It doesn't really matter the methods and strategies that we're going to be using to build this website can be applied anywhere. Now before we begin, I've listed all the resources that you're going to need down below, and I've broken things down into small digestible chunks. I do as much as I can screen share style. So if you have two monitors, let this class are on one and you can follow along on the other. But before we get started, I kinda wanna give you a 30000 foot overview and a rundown of exactly what we're going to be building. I'm going to start using terms like domain hosting, HTTPS. And I want to give you an idea of how they all fit together before we start going over. So let's hop into my computer and I'll show you how it works. All right, so we're here now at a blank canvas for our business. And the first thing that we're gonna do is we're going to pick up a domain name. Now your domain name will either match your brand name or you can just use your name at a.com address. And all a domain is literally it's just, it's just a web address. This tells people where to find you online. A domain name by itself is not a website. It is literally like a mailbox in a void. There's nothing there, but it tells people where to find you. That's why we hadn't have to pick up hosting. Web hosting is like the plot of land that we're going to be building our house on. You can get web hosting from a number of different companies. But then once we have a domain and hosting setup, we're now able to build our website, build our content, actually put our house there. So now when we tell somebody to go to our address, they pull up to the address, pull up to the mailbox and there's a nice, really cool-looking house sitting there. But the house itself is actually made up of a bunch of different parts. Again, we're going to start with a blank slate. And the first thing after we get our hosting setup is we're going to be installing WordPress. Wordpress is like the framework of that house. This is just what your website runs on. And exactly. It's just like this. It's like the two-by-fours that give you the same general shape of the house. After we install WordPress, there's going to be a theme that we install now our WordPress theme is just basically a set of rules for all of our posts and all of our pages to follow. So that way they all look the same. It's almost like putting the siding on your house to give it kind of a big shape. But we're not again, we're not quite there yet in terms of having a house it's ready to go into. Then we're going to create some compliance pages. Now these compliance pages, there's a handful of them. They're kinda like that important binder that you keep either in your office or in your utility room somewhere. And it has all the manuals to all the appliances. It has everyone's important records, birth certificates, passports, kinda that folder that sits and you never really touch it unless you need it. These are things like your privacy policy, your affiliate disclosure, and your contact us page. You create them once, you stick them away in a corner and they really never get used again unless someone asks for it. We're then also going to install some plugins. Now plugins are like the utilities in your house. Every one of them has, has a certain purpose that's going to benefit the website. Much like utilities benefit the house. So we're going to install plug-ins that are meant to speed up our site. Ones that are meant to help us rank better in SEO. And I'm gonna go through each one as we set them up. But that's like putting in your hot water heater, putting in your furnace, your air conditioning unit, all of those things that kinda run in the background and make the site or make the house that much better. Plugins are going to run in the background and just make this site that much better. Most people are going to be completely unaware that most of them exist. Once we've done all that, we put up our framework, we've covered it in a basic shape. We've put all our reference material together and we've installed all of our utilities. We're then just going to have a blank website that we can then furnish with our posts and our content. That's going to be our images or articles or videos if we want to put them up there, podcast episodes, if you want to host them up there. That's really just like the furniture and the and the decorations inside the house. That's gonna be the last thing that we do, and that's going to be the thing that's on you to keep going after the program ends. I'm going to walk you through all of the setup, but it's going to be on you to keep writing and creating the posting content if that's what you wanna do. So hopefully that helps you understand how everything fits together when we're building a website from scratch. In the next lesson, we're actually going to buy our domain name and then we're gonna go from there, building a website. See you there.
2. Domain Strategies & Hosting Setup: Hey, what's up, guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to pick up a custom domain name and keep all of your information private so no one else can see it. So without any further ado, let's hop right into my computer. I'll show you how to do it. All right, Guys, we're going to head on over to name cheap to pick up our domain. And there should be a button somewhere below this video where you can head on over to the screen. That way you can follow along. And we're going to be using named cheap for our domains for a couple of reasons. Number one, as the name implies, domains are very cheap over it named sheet. And number two, they offer free privacy protection with every single domain. Without the privacy protection it named cheap offers, your name, phone number, and address are going to be out on the Internet for everyone to see. This typically leads to a lot of spam calls from web developers trying to sell you different services. And they really don't stop once they start asking me how I know at this point, I hope that you have a brand name picked out for yourself. If not, just grabbed your name as a domain and build a personal brand around the website. Because it's always better to just start and kinda fix the mistakes later as you go, as opposed to worrying about everything being perfect and suffering into analysis paralysis and not taking any action at all. All right, so to get started over it named Sheep, we're going to go right in and click on this big search bar and type in our brand name. Once we've done that, we're going to hit Search. Now you should always look to grab at.com web address whenever you can. And here's why. When people start to remember your brand name or they think about your website, they're naturally going to put.com anyway. Now after our first search, it looks like super awesome brand name.com is available. Kind of assume that it would be, but what if you go to find a.com web address and ends up not being available. So let me show you an awesome tool that name sheep offers for free. I can help you find a brand name that's available. So if you get to this screen and any web address that you have typed in is not available. There's a little red button up here that says beast mode. I want you to click that button and go into beast mode. Now what BCE modes going to do is be Eskimo is going to allow you to enter keywords that you want to target. And then it will auto-generate a hundreds of domains that are available. Now to get started in Vizmode, you're going to enter up to 5000 domains are keywords up here. You really only need four or five of you try to enter 5000, you'll be here a week. But let's say you're in the health and fitness space, write something like healthy, something like diets. Something like say Quito, something like fat loss. And another keyword and let's go body. Why not? So we've got five keywords in the health and fitness space. When you come down here where it says price range, we're going to set this, I like to set this down to about $20. And that's because if you're in a competitive space like health and fitness and you end up having a very valuable keyword is a domain sellers. We will charge a premium over the typical $9 a year. I've seen them 1005 thousand. I've seen domains go for about $20 thousand. Now if you've got a budget and want to spend $20 thousand on a domain name. Go ahead. Nobody's stopping you. I personally wouldn't. All right. So now that we've set our price range were to come over here on the right side. And again, we want just.com addresses. So we're going to come down here and you see this little cloud here that says com. We're going to click that and now it's only going to be.com's over here where it says Transform. What I'd like to do here is I like to go pluralized nouns. What that's gonna do is that's going to add an s. So if you had a diet, it'll go to diets or body will be bodies. And then the last thing I wanna do here is append prefix and suffix. Now what this is gonna do is this is going to add little filler words to the beginning of your domain and different suffixes to the end. Now when you're using these, just make sure that they make sense in your domain name. So for instance, if we're going to use diet.com, diet Lee doesn't make any sense, so we're not going to use that suffix. So again, in our health and fitness example here, Lee probably doesn't make sense labs, hub, HQ. I'm going to keep HQ on there because if you want to be the diet weight-loss HQ, we'll leave that there. And as far as prefix open, use a get everything I think, but meat might make sense. So now that we have all of our settings here, when I click this big Generate button here on the bottom. Now this is going to start to generate all the available domain names. It might take a few minutes. Now after it's been run, especially you can see the health and fitness space is very competitive. And you can see that most of these domains have already been registered because they're grayed out. So for instance, get healthy.com, 1995, it was registered. Healthy.com was 1994. I mean, some of these some of these had been 20 years 20 years ago. We had no shot. So we're going to come down here and we'll see the ones that are available. So for instance, try fat loss.com. Use fat loss.com. Try bodies, again. Might not make sense. Open bodies.com not really bodies HQ might attract a different audience than you're looking for. So basically what you wanna do is you want to scroll through these different domains, find one that makes sense, And then we're gonna end up purchasing it. For the purposes of this video, I'm going to use try fat loss.com and click Add to Cart. We're gonna go view item and we're gonna start the checkout process. Once we get to the checkout page, you'll see that it defaults to a one-year registration. I typically leave it at one year unless it's something like my name, you can commit up to 10 years and you'll just pay $8.88 cents per year. So a 10-year registration would run You just under $90. Now I always check the auto renew button because the worst thing that can happen is that you spend a year building a brand, building equity, your site starts to blow up. Forget what day you bought that website. It expires and somebody else purchases the domain, that would wipe out a year's worth of hard work all because you forgot to check a box. On the flip side, if you check that box, you spend a year working on your site and it doesn't really catch on the kind of give up, you kind of forget about it. And then a year from now you'll get an email from name cheap saying that it renewed and you're out nine bucks, you got to cancel it. Big deal. After you check that box, you want to make sure that domain privacy is enabled and it's auto renewed because it's free forever. This is the box that you need to check so that none of your private information gets out there in the world. After we're done here, we're going to scroll down the page, all of these things, web hosting, SSL, VPN, WordPress, professional e-mail, pass on all of them. We're going to pass on them all because we're going to set up either free alternatives or better alternatives later on in the course. After that's done, we click Confirm Order. And if you don't have a name cheap account, you can just sign up and create one here on the right side. I already have a name, sheep accounts. I'm going to log in using my own. After you configure your account, you should be taken to a screen like this with the WHO has contact information. You want to make sure that this is all correct. Make sure all your credit card information is correct, billing address is correct. And then again, it makes sure that all of this box right here is checked automatically renew all eligible purchases, get domain registration, domain privacy, everything. And when that's all done, come down here, click Continue. You'll be taken to the order confirmation screen again, free domain privacy, domain registration for one-year payment details are all correct. And then you hit pay now. And once you hit pay now, you then own your domain name. Congratulations, on this video. In this lesson, we're actually going to pick up our hosting and setup our hosting for our content site. If you remember from the website anatomy, video, hosting is the dirt on which we're actually going to build our business and build our website. Now we're going to be using Host Gator as our hosting software because it's very inexpensive and it's very beginner friendly. So below this video, there's going to be a button. It'll take you right over to Host Gator, where you can actually follow along for the rest of the video. Let's hop and that a computer and get to it. Okay, So we're here on host Gators website. You should be seeing a screen or something similar. And to really just get started here with Host Gator they have is big yellow Get Started button, which we're going to click on there. Now that's going to bring you here to host Gators pricing page. And on this page you'll be able to actually pick your plan and there is absolutely no reason to get anything more than the hatchling plan. If this is your first business refers to affiliate business. This is all, this is really all you need. Single website. Now in addition to being very beginner friendly, I've also chosen host gator because they give you this, It's a free SSL certificate. Now if you go onto a website and you see the http slash slash, that is a non secure website. If somebody goes on their phone and they go on to that, they'll get a big warning and says, Hey, your website's not secure and a lot of people will actually click back off. That'll hurt your conversion rate. To get the HTTPS type website, that's a secure website. Your website will need a, an SSL certificate, a security certificate. And Host Gator includes all of these with their plans. So I'm gonna go here, I'm gonna click Buy Now, get the hatchling plan. Now the question you are probably wondering, hey, DOM, why did I not get the one-year free domain from my host gator plan? And the reason is you never, as a rule, you generally don't want to buy your domain and your hosting at the same place over time. And as your business grows, you may want to change your hosting platform to something, maybe dedicated something a little bit faster, something a little bit more expensive. And if your domain and your hosting or bought from the same provider, it makes it very, very hard to do that. So up at the top, here we go. I already own this domain. And what you would do now is you would actually add the Azure domain that you've bought from named sheep in this line. Now I'm actually building a website as I'm creating this program. So I'm going to name the, I'm going to bring in the domain name that I've previously bought from name sheep myself. When we come on down here to our hosting plan, I'm going to recommend that everyone go on the hatchling plan. Because again, if it's your first website, it's your first business was no reason to get too fancy. And now here's far as a billing cycle. Now, with host, unlike with your domain registration with hosting, you actually get a bulk discount if you commit upfront. Now this is something that Host Gator does. I'm not a huge fan of it, but you'd see that they commit you to 36 months at 275 a month upfront. But if you do the math and you come down here, they want a $156 order. Again, if you have a budget that allows it and you'll want to commit to it for three years. Great. I'm not I don't want to stop you. But if you're just starting out, can pick the one month, one month, ten, 95, That's it. You'll also want to come down here, create your host gator account. Enter your billing info. After you've filled in all of your information above, you're gonna come down here to the additional services and you're going to uncheck the site backup and uncheck site lock essentials. Now this might seem silly at first because why would you want to knock back up your site and why would you not want a secure it? Well, we're actually going to find other tools that are free that do the same thing. Down here. Sometimes you can find a coupon code or not. You can buy just do a search. I'm not sure when you're, when you're actually viewing this. Now, if you come down here based on all the changes that we made, that what was a $156 order is now only in $11 order. Now, I'm going to go in, fill in my information off camera and I'll meet you guys on the next screen. Okay, So after we have everything filled in Room, click the Checkout Now button. It's going to take you to this loading screen while they set up your account. After your account is finished getting setup, you'll see this screen, which is your dashboard inside of host gator. I'm going to end this lesson right here. In the next lesson we're going to set up our custom e-mail addresses.
3. WordPress Install & Initial Cleanup: Hey, what's up, guys, Welcome back. In this video I'm actually going to show you how to install WordPress onto your content blog site. And that way we can start building pages and posts and start filling out this brand new website that we're creating. Now we're working on a WordPress website because WordPress is pretty much the standard when it comes to web sites around the world. Google likes it. It's very SEO friendly and they're very stable. Wordpress websites can actually handle a lot of traffic and there are an infinite amount of plugins and support that you can use that are compatible with your WordPress infrastructure. So with that said, we're going to hop on over to host gator. I'm gonna show you how to actually install WordPress on your website. All right guys, So we're here back into our host gator see panel, I assume at this point that you know how to get to this screen if you don't, just go back to an earlier video, I showed you the whole login process. But once you're here, we're going to come down here into where it says software, go to WordPress manager by soft delicious. This is where we're going to be to actually install our WordPress. So we click on here we go install. Now we're going to choose 5.7, which is the most most recent version of WordPress and then installation URL. We're going to leave this here, it's secure. And then obviously we have our domain and the directory. We're going to leave that blank. If we put something there, we put something it says home and we put something in his blog or something in order for someone to hit our WordPress website, they're going to have to enter that extension. If you leave that blank, once someone once somebody enters your website name, they're going to be taken to your WordPress website. So leave that blank. It's very important. I can't stress it enough. Site name we're going to go we're going to fill in the site settings, your site name. We're going to click that to a site description enable the multi-site option. I'm going to leave that blank for now. You've got unchecked. As we come down here to our admin, admin account settings, you want to create a username that you can remember to log into your website. Now for password, I like to use Last Pass, which is I'll leave a link below. It's a free password manager where you can generate these big long, strong passwords. And you don't have to actually remember because last pass will. So I create my admin password, the admin email. This is something that ideally you want to put on your domain name. This is where they're going to send your password reset requests as well as your username. I forgot my username emails. So make sure that's in their language. I'm going to leave it here on English. When it comes down to plug-ins, I'm gonna leave this blank because when to manually configure our plug-ins later on, advanced options, I'm not even going to touch, we're going to keep everything here stock. When it comes to themes. You can use a free WordPress theme, but a lot of them are very slow. They're not very SEO friendly. I'm actually going to recommend thrive themes later on in the course. But if you want to show a free theme, that's fine. Thrive themes you're going to have to pay for right now. I'm just going to pick one here that I think looks okay. I'm going to select that theme. You can spend some time selecting a theme. It doesn't really make a huge difference in your site. Once we have our theme selected, we actually set the e-mail installation details. I always email just in case if I need to get a professional involved, the instructions are there. And I just go here and click Install. And then we just let the software do its work. And now after everything's installed, you should see this screen here. We can actually have an openness in a new tab will show you what the website looks like and then the administrative URL. This is going to be something that you want to bookmark. Because if you want to go in and post something and do any kind of back-end work on your site. It's your domain slash WP admin. I'm going again open this up here on a new tab so I can show you. Okay, so I wanted to update, you want to actually went to my WordPress admin to kinda show you guys the next lesson. I ended up getting this screen. This is part of building a business. You will have errors, you will have things go wrong. I wanted to show this inside of the course. So what I did was I actually went onto my, I actually went onto my host gator main main dashboard. And I contacted Host Gator live support chat. And I actually got connected to an agent inside of maybe five minutes. They told me that because we bought our domain from name cheap, we actually need to point our name servers to host gator. Let me show you how to do that. I was gonna do this in a later, in a later lesson and we're going eventually change them over to Cloudflare. But to get everything up and running in the beginning with Host Gator support, we have to point things at Host Gator. So we're going to hop on over to name sheep, go on to our account. Then on this screen under the Manage, you come down here towards his name servers. Now normally it'll say name cheat, basic DNS. So again, without getting too technical, these are domain name servers. Now you want to go down here to custom DNS and you want to have coast Gators name servers in there. Now without getting too technical because you're on a shared plan, you might be on a different server than I am. I'm also unshared, but Host Gator has a number of different servers. So to get the correct values to add here, I want you to go back into Host Gator, started chat, and then ask them where to point the name servers for your website if you get the message here for, for your WordPress not working. And now the worst part of anything online setting up websites and now you have to wait 24 hours for that diff the change to take effect. So I'm going to pause here for the day will come back tomorrow and I will update you guys and let you know how it went. So it's the next day and we want to check to see if that change in the name servers has actually propagated in that our sites should be working for correctly. So we're going to hop on into the computer and see what happened. So we're gonna come up here to the search bar, type in our website. Let's see what pops up. So it looks like our theme has taken. It looks like our name servers are correct. This is the theme that we actually picked from Host Gator. But now let's see, we can actually log in the hashtag WP admin. Alright, this is a very, very good sign. This is our WordPress login. Click our password that we have in. We're gonna go to login and it worked. So now we have WordPress successfully installed on our new website. I'll see you guys in the next video where we clean up all the stock plug-ins and we start to install things the right way. Hey, what's up, guys? Welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to clean up all of the stock WordPress plugins and kind of give yourself a blank slate so we can build a proper website from the ground up. So let's hop into my computer screen and I'll I'll walk you through the whole process. All right guys. So we're here into our WordPress dashboard. And if you're unsure how to actually get to this screen here, you're going to go up to your domain name.com slash WP admin. That is, should take you to a, to a login page or you put in your WordPress username and password that you've saved from the last video. And when you come in, your page should look something like this. It can be overwhelming, it can be intimidating. But it's important to know most of this is really just adds and we're going to delete most of it. What happens is some companies will actually partner up with WordPress and they'll become these suggested stock plug-in. And it might not necessarily be the best, but it's a way for these companies to get leads. It's a way for them to actually get sales. So we're going to clean this all up because we're going to use like four or five plugins rather than this whole mess that we have here are say it's going to run better, it'll be faster and you'll start to rank higher in search. So to start the whole process when it come down over here where it says plugins and when click on Installed plugins, it's going to bring us all the way down here. If you scroll down, now you see this is all of our plug-ins right now. Now we're going to deactivate an uninstall. Every single thing that you see, with the exception of Akers Smith, I think I'm saying that right. And jetpack, everything else is going to go. Alright, now that we have absolutely everything deleted except these two plugins, we're going to set up our jetpack account. Now, what jetpack does is jetpack allows us to collect, to connect our host gator hosted website along with WordPress.com. This is going to do a couple of things. One, it's going to let our posts and our site content show up on wordpress.com In the reader app. And that should just bring us some, some organic traffic as people are going to get, suggests that our blog over time, what it's also going to do, it's also going to allow us to check our stats through the WordPress app on our phone. This way it's an easy way to check stats and it's very reliable. It'll tell us things each day like how many people came through from surge, how many people came in from through Facebook? How many page views versus a lot of basic stats that you're going to see. And a very easy to read manner, much easier then you're going to see on Google Analytics. So let's hop back into the computer and let's get it all set up. All right, so we're going to be back in here and we're going to click on this big green button. You should have it here that says setup jetpack. Click on there. It might take a while to load. Okay, So what this is going to do now, I already have a jetpack account that I'm going to actually set up and integrate here. If you don't, it's going to ask you to create a jetpack account and it's basic stuff. Yeah, your picture, your name, your email address, very, very simple things. Um, I'm just gonna approve my existing account here because I want to link this to my actual website. It's going to authorize there. Now when it takes you to this page, I pass on all of the stuff. I come down here. And right here where it says jet fact, jetpack three. I click right onto here. And now it's gonna ask us a little bit about our website and it's probably going to make us another recommendation. Now when you get here to related posts, I'm going to click on not now because we're going to use related posts inside of our thrive themes later on. If you're, if you're not using a thrive themes, I would definitely recommend having related posts turned on. Because what that's gonna do is that when someone gets to the end of your article, they're going to see other stuff that you've written. It's going to suggest them, they're going to stay on your site longer. That sends good signals to Google to also raise things in, raise your site and search. So I'm going to click not now for now. Now, creative male, this is again Constant Contact. I'm going to pass on this because we're going to use thrive themes later on when it comes to this site accelerator, I'm going to turn that on because a faster site is a site that's better for the user. And that's also going to raise you in search rankings. Now I'm also going to recommend WP rocket the speed up your site. But we're going to have this too because you can't have too many site accelerators. And once we get to this page, we're done, we can leave that. Okay, so once we're done with setting up jetpack, we're going to set up the Akers Smith that we're going to start the anti-spam plugin. So we'll come back here to plugins, installed plugins. And again now we have jetpacks that up actually was something that I like to do is I'd just like to enable auto updates because I don't like to be bothered with having to update things. Okay. So to set up our anti-spam plug-in, where it come over to here where it says Settings, click up here. And now that we already have jetpacks setup but can click simply just say connect with jetpack. And it's that simple. Now we've actually have it set up because we're set up through jetpack. Now as far as the strictness of it, I like to silently discard the worst and most pervasive spam sewing never see it. And these things are horrendous, like think every foul word you ever heard could end up in these comments. So I don't even want to see it. Get rid of it. And then as far as being GDPR compliant, I just display the privacy notice under your comment forms. Fair enough. Save the changes and then we should be done. So now just for good measure, we're gonna go back to our Installed plugins and we're gonna make sure that automatic updates are turned on for both. This is something that's going to go work in the background. We don't want to have to deal with it again. Now that automatic updates are on for both plugins, we have all the stock plug-ins deleted. We now have a blank canvas on a good WordPress site running correctly. I'll see you in the next video.
4. Creating Subdomains & Custom Emails: Hey, what's going on, guys, In this video, we're going to set up our subdomains. So when we eventually go to hook up our funnel builder and our tracking software, the work is already done, but before I just hop into my computer and show you exactly how to do it, let me explain what a sub-domain actually is. Now if you look up here, your domain name really is just your brand name plus the.com. Your sub-domain is anything that goes in front of the main brand name. For instance, www is a very common sub-domain, and typically it's the default that most people use. If you were to change this www dot, something like a blog or something like g or k or whatever you want to. You can direct people to a separate website that's at the same address. For instance, you could have www dot your domain.com be your main blog website, but your funnels could be located at say, g dot your domain.com or go dot your domain.com. That's what we're going to set up in this video. We're going to create these separate little subdomains so that when we eventually get on our software, we can just hook them up without doing any additional work. So let's hop on over to Host Gator and I'll show you exactly how to do that. Okay, So we're back here in Host Gator again, portal dot Host Gator.com should be a button below the video. If you want to go right into it. It'll bring up your I don't bring up your main dashboard. We want to go ahead and we want to launch our cPanel. That'll take us over here onto our control panel. If we come down into the word says domains, if we come over here, click sub-domains will click on that. And this is where we're going to actually create a sub-domain to add to our website. Now the convention that I use, I use this sub-domain of t for all of my tracking software, and I use this sub-domain of go for any my funnels. So right up here in our sub-domain, I'm going to just type the sub-domain, go, use my domain name and hit Create. And it should show up right here on the bottom. And I'm also going to just type a single letter T. Just click Create. And it'll show up right down there. It's that simple to create a sub-domain. So this is something that might not make sense right away, but I promised later on I'm going to come back to it. See you in the next video. Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video we're going to set up our custom e-mail addresses for our brand new business. There's a couple of e-mail addresses that we need to get set up. And I'm going to show you the reasoning and the strategy behind it before actually going in and showing you how to create them click by click. So let's hop into my computer. I'll show you how it works. So first let's answer the question as to why we need a custom e-mail address. The first reason is that it makes your business appear more professional. Now if your, if your customer got an email from someone that was like a cash money killing the game 69 at gmail. Do you think they would even open an email? But if they got a They got an email from your name at your domain.com. It's, hey, this guy must be legit. They took the time to build a real e-mail address and took the time to build a real business. Let me open up their email. And again, in that same vein, Have you ever gotten an e-mail from an actual legitimate business that use the Gmail address, especially one that was based online. The second reason to create a custom email addresses that they build trust with your customer. I mean, it just shows your customer and shows your prospect that you actually took the time to create an actual customer e-mail address. You know, typically if someone's dealing with a scammer, scammers just do as little work as possible, just so that it can keep running the scam. So again, by having a custom e-mail address at your domain, you'll appear more legitimate, you'll build more trust with your audience. And the last reason is to get around spam filters. Now there's a couple of technical reasons I won't get into it. But typically e-mail providers like Gmail or Yahoo mail or comcast.net. They don't like to see marketing materials come from regular, regular email providers like a Gmail. So if you send it, if you send something and he affiliate marketing email from a Gmail account, Gmail will know that. And they'll just send it right to the spam folder. They like to see marketing materials come from custom domains. So without getting too technical, I'm going to leave it at that. But having your own domain does allow you to get around spam filters most of the time. And now let's talk about what email addresses that we need to create. Now we're gonna actually going to create a couple of them. And this is a method of presorted your email as an affiliate marketer, as an online business owner, you will get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day. That's no joke. I mean, I wake up every morning to at least 35 or 40 e-mails and they just keep coming in throughout the day. So what we do is we create certain e-mail addresses to help sort that male as it comes in. The first one we're going to create as your name, your domain.com friends. I use DOM at the data per nor.com. I uses for all of my content and uses all of my customer interaction E-mails. If someone wants to e-mail me, I give them that email address. There's also gives your customers are feeling that you're very approachable. I mean, imagine if you had you'll Russell at at click funnels.com, you had that e-mail address. I'm sure it's not that one because he probably get a 100 spam spam emails a day. But when you're small and you're starting out, people want to know, people want to get engaged with you. Alright? They're buying into you, not your brand, at least in the beginning. So by having that e-mail address again, you're bringing yourself closer to the customer and it gives them a sense of, hey, I can email the sky whenever I want. It's going to go directly to him. The next email that you're going to want to create is support at your domain.com. This is the e-mail that you're going to hook up to your help desk if you're using cartridge and if you're not, you'll still going to set this up because this is where you're gonna direct everyone that have their questions. That way if you go in and you check this e-mail address, you know, it's just going to be nothing but questions and you'll be doing nothing but helping people in that particular inbox. This next email address is probably going to be your most crowded. This is going to be vendors at your domain.com and this is where this is the email address that you're going to use when you sign up for all of your tools. This is going to be things like your funnel builder, your email service, and the editing software you use. You know, really anything that you buy for business purposes. And that's because when you sign up for these certainly the services you're gonna end up on their marketing lists. And they're going to send you a lot of marketing e-mail. If you use your main email, it's going to clog up your main, your main inbox and sometimes maybe a customer questions gonna go missed. So I set up this vendors email and just know that that's going to be filled with a lot of marketing junk mail. The next one that you want to create here as info at your domain.com. And I use info specifically because I only use it in a couple of places. You'll use it on your contact page, on your privacy policy, on any disclaimers that you have, really any legal and illegal disclosures. That way, if you get an email to your info email address, you know that it's something important. And again, it doesn't get buried in the vendor's inbox or it gets buried in your, in your, you know, your name email. Again, just a just a way of kinda resorting your stuff and keeping all of the important legal stuff elsewhere because somebody who's going to email that specific address is going through you're fine print. And typically only lawyers and regulatory bodies actually go through the fine print. And there's actually one more email address that I want you to create, and that is e-mail swipes at your domain.com. Now, as a marketer, as an affiliate, you're going to want to see how some of the top affiliates write their emails. And the easiest way to do that is just basically joined their list, opt in, and wait for them as an e-mail to you. So you can kinda see highly structured on the kind of stories that they tell. And you can learn a lot from just being on somebody's email list. And again, in the spirit of pre sorting, we want to set up a separate email address just for this because this one's gonna get a lot of mail and we don't want to clog up your phone notifications throughout the day. So if you use e-mail swipes at your domain.com, you can opt into people's lists and then just check it once a week to see that if you want to get inspired on how to write an email, this is something I didn't do, and I realized this after probably opting into about 20 lists that now I just got a bunch of marketing e-mail and my emails all clogged up. So I spent I spent to two days and subscribing and then re subscribing in people's lists. And now my inboxes are much cleaner. But now that we're done with the strategy, let's hop on over to Host Gator and actually set these up. Okay, so we're going to hop on over to portal dot Host Gator.com. And again, below this video, there should be a button. You can click the hop onto port on the host gator and then go dark down here and we're going to sign into our host gator portal. All right, so when we login to host gator, you're going to see a screen that looks just like this or something very, very similar. And it's going to show you a website here at the top. Now I have multiple websites, so I actually have multiple, multiples sections here. But at the bottom here you're going to see yours. We're going to click Launch cPanel. Now this is your control panel that's going to work all the backend in your website. Now it doesn't really matter who you used a host your website, your cPanel is going to look more or less the same among hosting providers, but to add an email address when it up here in the Email tab, we're going to put email accounts. And that's going to bring you to this screen where you can actually see all of the email accounts that you have. Over here on the right side where it says Create. We're going to click here to create. And then we're going to go at the carpentry corner.com, which is going to be my new website. We're going to create a password for it. Make sure you create a strong one. And then if you open up the Optional settings, you can, you can select storage space or for the, for this particular inbox. Since I'm creating the info inbox, I don't expect to get a whole lot of male there, so I'm going to limit it to 500 megabytes. If I'm going to do something like the vendors account, I would click this to be unlimited. And then again, automatically create folders. We can do that as well. And then we can also again send a welcome to welcome email to set up instructions for a mail client. This is if you wanted to hook your email up to your phone, which I'll show you how to do as well. We just click Create, and here we are. And now we actually have another email account created with our website. So we're gonna go through and we're gonna create again optional centering. Since since this is the vendors account, I'm going to go on limited. Leave the folder, send a welcome email, that's fine. And create that. Once you've actually created all of your email accounts, you're going to want to go in here and say chores has checked email. This is actually going to be how you login to check the emails themselves. Now you can change your email client between hoard or round cube. It doesn't really matter. I just use hoard because that's what they used three years ago and I've gotten used to it. You can use round cube. It doesn't, it doesn't really matter. That's just going to be the interface that you check your emails in. So once you go here, open up your, open up your inbox. Now this is going to be your email. What I recommend doing is bookmarking this page. This way you'll have something either on your, on your favorites tab, on your bookmarks. All you have to do is just click on it and it will open up your e-mail. You'll probably be prompted to put an e-mail address and password in. But you won't have to go through login, Host Gator, log into C panel, open up email accounts, check email. This way you'll just be able to open up one page and then enter an email address and a password and you're in, if you want to set something up on your phone, there are easy instructions. And we come back here over to this page and you click on where it says connect devices. This will give you all of the manual settings for your mail client. Okay, So what I've done now is I've actually mirrored by phone screen, so I can show you where to actually input all of this information over here, we're going to pull down from the top. I'm an Android user, it might, it's going to be similar if you're in, if you are an iPhone user. So I go into the settings here and we would go into accounts. And we would go down here to add a count. And then when you would want to do is you wouldn't want to add a, an I-map account. Now the difference between an IMAP and POP three email account without getting too nerdy is that a POP3 e-mail account will check periodically in sync every 10 minutes, every 15 minutes. And IMAP account will actually push constantly, instantly. You know, if you get an email to your inbox, it will immediately push it over to your phone. So I always go to set up and an I-map. I'll click on IMF. And then what's gonna do here? It's going to want you to enter your e-mail address. You'll enter e-mail address, you'll click Next. And I'll ask you for your password. We'll go into that. Now your server here that you see here where it says your incoming server and have your incoming server settings, you're gonna grab it off of the incoming server. I'm going to click Next. It's going to validate those settings and then went to the outgoing settings and validate that as well. And now you're going to have the option to do well, it says every 15 minutes long, notify me when e-mail arrives, sink email for this account, automatically download attachments when connected to Wi-Fi. I like to leave them all on. We're going to click Next. Now here it is. Next. So now if we go in there and now it now my email account has been added to my phone right there. I just click on here. And here it is. Now I can actually see all of my custom domain on my phone. And then you would just repeat that process for every email address that you want to hook up to your phone. So that's it. We now have custom e-mail addresses that we can now start looking like a real business when we apply to affiliate programs and when we talk to our customers. I'll see you guys in the next video.
5. Website Security: Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video, we're going to get a little bit nerdy for a second. That's because we're going to be speeding up and also securing our website for free using a service called Cloudflare. Now this is probably the most technical part of the course, so I am going to go slow. I'm going to make sure that I can explain everything because if you do this wrong, your site won't work. So it's happened at a computer and we'll go through this process really slowly. All right, so we're in our machine and there's gonna be a couple of tabs that I'm going to want you to open up so you have everything handy. The first place we're going to go is named Sheep. I'm going to put a button below the video that'll take you right there. And we're going to launch right into our Name Cheap account. Now when we log into name sheep, we want to go to Account, go right to our dashboard and it's gonna bring us to this screen when it come down, find the, find the domain name that we purchased and go here and click Manage. Now what we're gonna do here is I want you to stay on this page. But what we're gonna do is we're going to change our name servers one more time from Host Gator to Cloudflare. What that's gonna do is it's gonna, it's gonna shift control of our website from Host Gator over to Cloudflare. The next thing I'm going to want you to do is open up another tab and go to cloudflare.com. Click your sign up and create an account. It's pretty self-explanatory. However, I'm going to log into my existing account. Okay. Once you get set up and you create an account over a cloudflare, cloudflare, you should be taken to a screen that looks something like this. If you're not, just go up here and click on home, it will take you to the screen. We're gonna come up here to this blue button up here, which says Add site. You probably only have the blue button. We're going to enter our site now. Enter the domain name that you actually got from, from named cheap. Click Add site. Again, there's going to be an upsell here. You're not going to have to purchase anything. We're gonna do this down here for free. Click on the free plan and then click Continue. What Cloudflare is going to do that and it's going to scan all your, all your DNS records. This is all going to come from Host Gator, don't worry, this is going to be all automatic. It's my it might take a little bit of time though. While that's happening, I want you to head back on over to Host Gator, and I want you to log into your cPanel. We go to portal dot Host Gator.com. Again, I'm gonna put a button below the video. You can click over to Log, You're right in. Once you get logged in, you'll be taken to this screen. Click on for your website, come down here and go launch. C panel should be an orange button. Now wall Cloudflare is doing its thing. I want to explain exactly what we're going to be doing here. So as it stands right now, your website, if you come down here to where it says domains, and you come down here to where it says DNS zone editor. What we're going to be doing is we're going to be moving the control of this particular part from Host Gator over to Cloudflare. Click here to Manage. You'll see what I mean. If you look here at all of these records, all these records pretty much tell the Internet where to go. So if somebody types in, I want to go to my domain.com, www, it'll tell them that, hey, this website is located over on Host Gator or if I go to go dot my domain, this record will tell, Hey, this is actually not located over on Host Gator, it's located over on click funnels. You know, if someone sends an email to your domain, this tells you how to know how to redirect that. So this is all back-end stuff. Luckily, once we get this setup, it's only something we set up once and then we can forget about it pretty much for the rest of time. But what we're anybody again, what we're going to be doing is going to be changing the functionality here from Host Gator over onto Cloudflare. So I'm gonna click back here to go back to our cPanel. And the thing I want you to write down and remember where it is is on this right side here was his general information. You should see this shared IP address. This is the actual address on Host Gator where your website is. It's going to be different for every website. So just make sure you kinda keep that number. Keep that number handy. Okay. So after some time has passed, in this case, it was about five minutes. I came in and Cloudflare now found all of the DNS records over from Host Gator. If you really wanted to go through it, you can go through all those records from the other screener Host Gator. You'll find them all in here. Now we're going to come all the way down here. I'm going to click Continue. Now to actually make the change. We're going to change our name servers this way. This way we're gonna get Cloudflare, the ability to control our website. So we're going to see remove the name servers from named. We're going to hop back on over to name sheep. And we're going to remove the name servers for Host Gator and replace them with Cloud flares. So we're going to copy this. There's two of them. Copy one. We're gonna head back on over 2. We're going to head back on over to Name Cheap. We're gonna do a paste there. Come back over to Cloudflare, copy the other one, come back to Name Cheap, paste that, and then click this little checkmark and save it. And that's it. We're done. We're now telling the Internet that control of our website now belongs to cloudflare. That's how we're going to do all of our DNS records from now on. And you're also going to get a message at the top misses. It might take up to 48 hours to take effect. This was just the thing about the internet that I can't stand setting up new websites. You have to sit and wait so it may not be immediate. So let's hop on over to hop back on over to Cloudflare. And we're going to come in and check our name servers. Will click Finish later. Now let's check our name servers again. Still checking. We gotta wait a few hours until it's actually updates. Okay, So we're here The next day. We want to make sure that our name server change has propagated throughout the Internet. It's a very, very easy way to check that we're going to hop back over to Cloudflare. I'll show you how to do it. All right, guys. So we're back here on Cloudflare and we're going to look here at our website that we're looking to set up. And the way that you can tell whether the name server, the way you can tell whether that the name server propagation is taking place is if you head on over here to where it says DNS, when I click on over here. And we're going to scroll down, you'll see all of these. These are all the same DNS records that we had with Host Gator, except now they're all on Cloudflare. On the bottom here. There's nothing here in the name servers that says that it's still being set up. So Cloudflare nose and it's already said, hey, it's active, we're good, we're good to go. So that's it. Now we actually have all of our DNS control over at Cloudflare and our site has an extra layer of speed. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to secure your site for free. Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to go from HTTP to HTTPS and secure your site using Cloudflare. This is going to be a pretty quick video because Cloudflare does make it extremely easy to do. But first let me tell you why you would want to go to HTTPS. If you go to any reputable website, you're going to notice that in the beginning of their URL they have HTTPS colon slash slash. Now the http is the web protocol they use. The S stands for secure. This means that all of the data that sense is actually encrypted and just can't be seen by anyone. If you go to say a, you know, a personal blog or something like that, older website that's not exactly tech savvy. They might still be running HTTP. It's an older protocol and it's not secure in this day and age. If you're going on to an http website, your browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla, Firefox, pretty much any web browsers is going to give you this big warning. It's kind of flash and it's going to say the site you're entering is not secure. Do you want to proceed? Now? That's going to that's going to break a lot of trust with your customers on your website and it's and it cause a lot of them to bounce. So luckily, Cloudflare makes it real easy to get that HTTPS for free. Let's hop into my machine. I'll show you how to do it. All right guys, we're back here in our Cloudflare homepage. You should know how to login my now we're going to come in, click on our website that we're going to, we're going to change. And it's very, very simple. If we come up here to the top where it says SSL, TLS, click on that. And what this is gonna do it Actually it should default to full. Sometimes, sometimes it'll be up here at off, which will give you that HTTP. And then if you go in down here, full Cloudflare is going to secure everything end to end, all the way from your website to your user's browser. Because everything, again, everything's being proxied through Cloudflare. So yeah, as long as as long as this is sitting here full, you're fine, you're good. Your site is secure, your site is fast. It's that simple. If it's not, click this button and everything else will happen in the background. See you in the next video.
6. Writing Compliance Pages: Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video, we're gonna talk about probably the most boring topic of the entire program. And that is coming up with your compliance pages that are required on every website. And this is something that nobody ever wants to talk about. This is the flossing of affiliate marketing. So stick with me through this video and let's make it through together. First, let's talk about why we need compliance pages in the first place. And it's for three simple reasons. We want to get our ads approved. When we decide to run ads, we want to build trust with our customers that are on our website or on any of our landing pages. And this will also allow us to avoid getting shut down and banned from affiliate programs. If we have these pages on our website, it just brings our professionalism up a little bit more and brings us a little bit further away from the spammers and scammers of the industry. And there's really only three pages that you need. The first one is a privacy policy. Now this is required by law for any business that's operating online regardless of country. And this page tells your customer what info that you're going to be collecting, what you're using it for and whether or not you share it with anybody. This is unique to your business. Do not rip this off from somebody else. There's a free policy generator linked below this video where you can go in and I'll show you how to use it. And you can make one unique full of lawyers speak just for you. Do not copy your privacy policy from somebody else's business. I cannot stress this enough. This is, this is something that needs to be unique to your business. And below this video there's a free policy generator linked. So I will show you how to use it later on in the video. Just know that you can't just go copy and paste from somebody else. So I have it in all caps and that's wives that it three times in his video. The next Compliance page that you need as an affiliate disclosure, this is required if you're going to be doing affiliate marketing of any kind, people need to know that you're getting compensated when they click your link. Now this doesn't have to be a fancy page. It just has to say something pretty much to the effect that you'll receive compensation if they choose to purchase. But you also need to tell him that it doesn't affect the price that they pay. They're going to pay the same price for the product, whether you're getting a commission or not. Keep it simple, write it in your own voice. I'll show you an example later on in the video. And the last page that we're going to create as a contact info page. Again, this is something that just gives you that extra level of legitimacy and brands are more willing to work with you if they know how to get in contact with you, they are required for Facebook and Google ads. They build trust and legitimacy in your business. And at the very minimum, you don't have to put your phone number or email address at the very minimum, you need a snail mail physical address, but it also helps if you include an email address. Again, this just makes it easier for people to contact you. Now, I personally avoid placing a phone number, but if you want to answer the phone, there is no limit to a contact page. So you can actually have people contact you any way that you want. It's just important that you give people a way to contact you if they want to. Now, having said that, let's show you how to create each of these pages, we're going to head on over to WordPress and I'll show you how to do it. All right, so we're back here on our WordPress dashboard and we're actually going to put our compliance pages under our Pages tab. Now if you remember from the pages versus post video pages or something is static and they don't move. That's why we're going to put these pages under pages and not under posts. So we're gonna come over here, we're going to click on all pages. Now once you get into these pages here, you're not really going to see anything. If you pick the different theme, you might have something different. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click here and I'm just going to wipe them out, move them onto the trash. And there we go. Now we have a clean slate. Now we're going to click up here and we're going to say Add New. And the first one that we're going to create here is gonna be the contact page is going to be the simplest one to make. Okay, So this is really all we need to write for our contact page. If you have any questions or suggestions for the carpentry corner, we would love to hear from you. I have a mailing address and I have an e-mail address. It's all it is. It's all I need. It doesn't have to be this big long drawn out thing. Now before we hit Publish, we come over here to permalink and you see this URL Slug, make sure this says contact us or contact whatever you want to say. That what this is, this is actually the last part of the URL up here. So it's going to be your domain name slash, this part here. And then you come down here, It's gonna see here it is the carpentry corner.com slash contact us. Once we have that setup on enclosed permalink discussion, I'm going to disallow comments. Make sure that box is not checked. Now as far as featured image, if I want to make this a little bit special, we're going to add onto a website called Pexels.com. I want to grab a stock image. Let's type in Contact Us. Let's see what happens. Now since this is going to be in the woodworking niche, and I expect my niche to be mostly older men. So I'm actually going to take this little old rotary telephone. I'm going to download that. I'm going to use this as my featured image. Come right over here. Set featured image. Select the files to upload. And now right here I'm just going to change the old title here to be like old phone, something like that. And then just set the featured image. Now that we have everything mirror visibility, public Publish. Immediately we click Publish, publish. And now our contact page is alive or an click over here where it says view page. And if we look right now our image is enormous and our text is down here. But don't worry, our theme is going to clean this up later on. Right now I want you to just get these pages and get the text out there. So that way when we optimize with our theme, there is something to optimize. Now we're going to head back on over to Pages and we're gonna do our affiliate disclosure. Now we just title our page affiliate disclosure and then we're going to write out as simple. Simple disclosure based on the rules that I just told you. So here's what I've come up with. The carpentry corner may suggest products from time to time, these products may earn us affiliate and affiliate commission if you decide to purchase them. However, the price that you pay is not affected by the fact that we're compensated, we get the carpentry corner will only promote products that we believe in. Now this is going to be a simple woodworking Mitch site. Now I don't so I don't need to have any crazy affiliate disclosures in there. This will do. If you're going into something where you promote click funnels. Click funnels has specific affiliate disclosures that they want to see on your website. Be sure to include them. And just do that for every affiliate program that you, that you promote, you can put them on this page and you should be fine. But again, this is a very good starting point. Same thing, where to come here to our permalink affiliate disclosure, make sure there's no comments. And then for a featured image, I'm going to head on over to Pexels and we'll see what we can find. Okay, so after searching on Pexels for a while, I couldn't find anything that was free. Now normally I would just buy a stock image, but an affiliate disclosure image that like six people who are going to see, it's not worth $11 to me. So I went on another site that's a royalty-free image site called Pixabay. Pi x a DAY typed in disclosure and I found this one here that says transparency. Yeah, it kinda works. It's close again, not too many people are going to see it, but it does add something to the page once we have our, once we have our theme. So we're going to download that one there, and then we're gonna just gonna upload it. Same processes before, same thing, public immediately hit Publish and we're done. As for the privacy policy, I'm going to make it its own video because this one's running a little long, so I'll see you over there. Hey, what's going on, guys? Thanks for sticking with me through the compliance section. I know it's getting a little bit long in the tooth, but I promise you only have to do this once. This video is now going to show you how to do the privacy policy using a tool called terminally. So what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna create kind of a zombie page inside of WordPress, then hop on over to terminally create a policy and we're going to copy and paste. So let's head on over, show you how to do it. Alright, so we're gonna go back into WordPress, into our pages here, click on Add New, just like we normally do, simply just going to name it privacy policy. And then we're just going to hit Publish for now. Don't worry, no one's going to see your website with a blank page. Alright, now that that's done. Once that's done, we're going to head on over to a website called terminally dot io. There should be a button below this video. It'll take your right there. Now what this is, this is a Compliance page generator that allows you to get a couple for free. When I click here where it says try for free. And then what we're gonna do here is we're actually just going to create an account. Now, I created an account using e-mail from my website that I just created. When I click on our first website, one-click. Got it. Where it says website name. We're gonna put the name of your website and then the URL, same thing, HTTPS. Now this is where things are gonna get really boring and it's going to take a little while I'm going to do with fair amount of this off camera just so that I can show you because when I hop back over here on the screen, you're gonna do, there's a couple of things that general information. Then you have to do a bunch of settings. Then you have to answer questions and all these policies. And there's all these cookies, it's, there's all kinds of questions that they're going to ask you. And it's gonna take you about a half-hour to get through. And again, I'm going to do most of this off camera because I think you know how to actually fill in a form with your own information. And the questions are pretty straightforward. All right, so after we create our term, the account where we're basically taken to this page, we're going to enter all of our business information. This is pretty straightforward. You're gonna, you're gonna enter that into your business information. And then you're also going to enter your website info and you're gonna save at all what this is going to do now when you go to create your privacy policy, it's going to pull from this data. Once you're done with that, you've created both your business info and your website info. Come on down here to where it says policies. And you click on privacy policy. I'm going to click here new privacy policy. Add that. And now this is going to take a little bit of time. I'm going to do a lot of this off camera because there are, I mean, there's eight pages, but there's going to be multitude of questions on every page. It's going to ask you things that I don't think you want to see. A half-hour long video of me just going through questions are pretty self-explanatory. And really it's going to it's going to depend on your business, how you answer it. So I don't wanna, I don't want to prime your head with answers that might not be accurate. So I'm going to come back on camera after this is after I'm done through this, I'll kind of show you where to go. All right. So after you get to the end of all the questions, It took me about 10 minutes to get through and we're going to publish. And here we go. Now we actually have our nicely professionally generated privacy policy here on the left-hand side tells us everything based upon the how we answered the questions. Alright, so now just to add this to your website, when I click up here where it says Add to website, lab, grab the HTML format, copy it to a clipboard. And then what I do is I come into here for privacy policy, add the block. And there should be one here for HTML. We click HTML, do a Control V to paste. And there it is. We're going to update our post. And now when we come down here to View page, it should show up right on our site. And here it is. Here's our privacy notice. So now when somebody comes up here to our domain slash privacy policy, they're going to see our privacy policy. So there we have it. We have a compliant website, we've got our privacy policy, we have our affiliate disclosure, and we have our Contact Us page. You made it congratulate yourself. Most people skip this section. So I will see you in the next video where I promise we will do something that's a lot more fun.
7. Installing Your Theme & Plugins: Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. Welcome to a very exciting video module here, because this is actually where we're going to start setting up our theme. And we're going to start setting up all of the fun plug-ins for our website. We've already done most of the boring stuff. We've got our domain, we've set up our hosting, we've actually secured all of the backend. Now it's time to start adding a theme plugins and actually start creating some content on our blog, on our website, we're going to start getting found. So we're going to hop back into my machine and this video, I'm going to show you how to install thrive themes so you can have a nice, clean, fast, professional-looking website. Let's jump right in. All right, so now that we're here on the computer, I want you to head on over to thrive themes.com. There should be a button right below the video where you can click on it. It'll take you right over to the website where you can actually go and pick up your copy of thrive themes. Now the reason I recommend that you run a Thrive theme on your website is because it's inexpensive, it's high-performing and it's stable. I haven't had any problems with my theme since I got it a year and a half ago, I used to run free themes and they would often load slow. It would horribly impact my Google rankings. And oftentimes, plug-ins won't play well with free themes. But by jumping over to thrive, you're getting more than just a WordPress theme so that you get a whole bunch of stuff on there. But the real things that I like and I recommend for is the one that thrive theme builders. So you can actually have plug and play for your entire website. But you also get thrive architects. So if you want to individually design a page on its own, you can do that as well. Create some custom landing pages if you'd like. It lets you do that granular page by page. But what I like most about Thrive is there thrive leads. What this allows you to do is this allows you to collect email addresses from people who come onto your website. You can deliver your lead magnets. You can build an email list and you can retarget to people who happen to stumble upon your site. So to get thrive themes and click on this big orange button here that says get thrives sweet. And that's going to take you on over to this landing page where they're going to try to explain to you thrive suites some more. Feel free to watch this video if you want, but if you want to take my word for it, we'll click on this orange button here. This is get thrives, sweet. And this is gonna take you right to a sales page or you can sign up for thrive itself. Now, thrive is 19 bucks a month, but they bill you $228 a year. I'm on the yearly plan because it only takes one high ticket sale to pay for multiple years of your block. Not to mention thrive allows you to install these tools and up to 25 websites. So if you get one website up and running, you can use the same license 24 more times for the same price. So we click the green button here by thrives sweet. So we're just going to fill out the checkout page. I'm already a member, so I'm going to go login and show you how to install it on the website. All right, so after you've actually purchased thrive themes and you're taken to the member dashboard we wanna do here is click under this number one here, download the thrived product manager plug-in, going to download it right to your computer over here. And then we want to login back to our WordPress website. Now what we're gonna do is we're going to actually add thrive themes as a plugin. So I'm gonna come over here to the left side where it says plugins. I want to go here where it says Add New. Give that a click. And then we go right up here where it says Upload plugin. Click there. Upload the download file. We want to upload the thrived theme Product Manager. Click Install. You're going to get this message here where it says activate the plugin, Click that if it's installed correctly, which it should be. And now we've got thrive product manager on our list of available plugins, and you'll also see it here on the left side. Now what we wanna do is we want to go over here to Product Manager. Click on that. And it's going to ask you to login to your thrive themes account to actually access your product. Since you just created an account, you should have your login information handy. Now it looks like mine automatically married up, which is really cool. You might have to put in your username and password to get to this screen. Once you get into the screen, we want to grab thrive leads, thrive architect and thrive optimize. Thrive optimizes going to give you the ability to split test one way or another if you're building landing pages. Now we're going to click Install and sit and wait. After it's done, we'll click go to thrive themes dashboard. And we should see our installed product. We have thrive themes up top, thrive leads and thrive architect. After doing all that, we want to go back to our Product Manager screen, scroll down a little bit. And some of the Thrive team builder is we want to click install theme and then install again. This is going to give us access to the actual thrive shape shifter theme, which we're going to build our website on. When that's all done in installed, we click on Activate Thrive team builder. And now if we head back on over to our website, you'll see that it's a much cleaner layout. It looks a lot better than it did like a jumbled mess we had before. And that's it for this video, I want to keep it short and actionable. In the next one, we have a couple more plug-ins to set up. And once that's done, we can then start filling out our website with content. See you in the next video. Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video, we're gonna get our last couple of plug-ins setup tuned up. That way our website is a 100 percent up and ready to roll. So without wasting any time, let's hop back in into our WordPress backend and we'll get started. All right, so back here in our WordPress dashboard, we're pretty much going to be working here in this plugin section. So we're gonna go into here plug-ins here on the left side, click Add New. And the first plugin we're going to look for is called a magnify. Now what a magnify is gonna do, it's going to compress all of your photos and it's going to help them load better and faster. The biggest thing that slows down Google rankings besides not having relevant content is page load speed. Google knows that its users want to have pages load pretty quickly. And the, and the biggest thing that actually slows webpages down is huge, beautiful images. What it magnifies going to do, it's going to compress them using some sort of code or magic. And it's going to make your page loads, load much faster than they normally would without it. So we're going to come over here. I'm gonna click Install. Now, once it installs, we're gonna click Activate. And it should be right over here on our list of installed plug-ins. Now, just because we activated, it does not mean that it's actually working yet. We're actually gonna have to create an account with a magnify. It is free. They do have a paid plan once your site gets bigger, but when you're starting out, you can have their free plan. We're going to enter an email to create an account. After you've created your account, you shouldn't be taken over to this screen. I already have an account, so you can't actually watch me set up my account. But once you enter all of your information, it's pretty self-explanatory. Again, there is a free plan that they have, but we're gonna come up here to the top right. We need to grab our API key. So I'm gonna come over here on the right, come down to where it says API integration. We're going to click down here and you're gonna see your access tokens gets going to be different for everybody, so don't give it away. That's why I have mine blurred out. We're going to copy that to the clipboard. Come back on over to our WordPress website. Click I have my API key, paste it right here and click Connect. And now if we click over here, go to Settings. You'll see that we actually have a magnify settings and we can set this up. Now for me as an affiliate marketer and a business blog, images aren't that important to my website. I do mostly screenshots and stuff on my blogs. On the woodworking site. I'm probably going to do something similar, not so much screenshots, but they're not going to be super-rich detailed images. So I'm going to have ultra, I'm going to set altruist so I get maximum speed on the website, even if the image gets a little bit grainy, coming further down the general settings, I would leave everything pretty much the same. Now what I'd like to do here is resize the larger images you want to leave that checked. We want to bring this actually this number down 2500 pixels is an enormous picture. And large pictures will take a long time to load. Now, I want to bring this down, but you don't want to bring it down larger than your largest thumb, smaller than your largest thumbnail. So there's actually a recommendation right here of 2048 pixels. So that is actually the lowest and the smallest that you can actually resize pictures for them to actually sound good. Or I should say, over here on the side, we can see if we add our theme. After we add our theme to our optimization imagine file and start optimizing our theme images as well. Coming further on down settings, you wanna leave this all the same. Now we're going to save changes. Now it's important to know if you do this before you add pictures, you won't have to do anything else. If you add a magnify after you have pictures on your website, you're going to have to do their bulk optimizer, which is then going to run through all the pictures on your website. And it's going to actually re-optimize them and compress them, make them smaller. That could take a couple of minutes. I had to do this on my other site and it took me about 15 or 20 minutes for the software to work through everything on the, on the site. So do this first and save yourself some time. All right, so the next plugin that we're going to install is called Rank Math. What Rank Math is is Rank Math. Seo optimized plugin, it's free and it blows Yoast out of the water. You may have heard of Yost, you may not have. But, but rank basically what Rank Math does is once you've figured out a keyword that you want to target with a blog article. Rank Math makes it very easy. It'll tell you how optimized you are. Tell you what you need to do to optimize for that keyword. It's awesome. So we're going to hop back into our plugins, add new screen, go on over here and type in Rank Math. And it's going to be the top one here on the left with this little graph in little bar graph line. Click Install. Now, then we're going to activate it. You always have to activate plug-ins after you install them. And there it is. There's nothing really to set up with Rank Math until you actually get into it. So we're gonna go back to our plugin screen here and we're going to install. The next plugin that we're going to install is called really simple SSL. What really simple SSL does, it's going to force all of your website traffic to go through the HTTPS protocol. If you remember from the Cloudflare setup and you'll remember from the host gator setup, we do have SSL enabled, but it's not always going to go through there. At really simple SSL will force everyone to go through the secure server and not get that warning. So we're going to hop over here, click Install Now, click on activate. And this is going to ask us to do a bunch of things to get our site ready. Since our site right now is barren, There's not much on there. I'm going to click here, just says go ahead and activate SSL. This is why we're adding all of our plugins before we actually put a bunch of content onto our website. And now if we head on over to our website again, if you look up here in the URL bar, you see this little padlock here. If we click that, it'll tell you our connection is secure and were forced over SSL. It's that simple. The next plug-in that I want to grab here is called insert headers and footers. And this app is purely for convenience. If you wanted to, you could go in and you could edit the page code, the HTML code, and put tracking pixels and all kinds of other tracking code that you want on your website manually. But if you're like me, I'm not a coder, you're probably not a coder. So what insert headers and footers does, it allows you to insert, copy and paste tracking code without having to be a coder. So when we're back into the plugins page, we want to type in, insert, insert headers and footers. And it should be this plug-in right up here in the top left, install, and then activate. And then we should see it right over here. The next plugin that we're going to install is called WP word count. I like to use this just for stats. Now Rank Math will actually count the word, the word count on each post that you do. But if you want, I just use it to compare my size of my site with some others. So if I want to quickly and see, hey, I have a 100 thousand words site or I have a 60 thousand words site or a 400 thousand words site. Wp word count will do this in a matter of seconds. So already go back to the install plugin, plugins page type in WP word count. And it should be this one here in the top-left, looks like this click Install, and then we activate and it should show up. Where is it right down here. Everything here is active. Now these next two plugins that I'm going to have you install R. We're going to backup our site and we're gonna make sure everything's compatible before any major updates. Don't worry, they're both free, but they're definitely something that you really should have on your site. So back to the plugins page. This is becoming our favorite page really quickly. And the next one that we're going to go for is called PHP compatibility checker. And then we should again find that here up in the top-left. You're not going to use this plug-in too often. This one here is just going to check all kinds of back-end tech stuff on your website before WordPress updates, we're going to activate that one up there and you'll see it on the bottom here. Now this next plugin is arguably the most important on your entire website and it's called updraft plus, this plugin is going to give you the ability to make regular backups of your website. So that way if you get hacked, Host Gator goes down for whatever reason you lose your entire website. You have a saved copy in a secure Google Drive somewhere. So let's go set it up where it come on back here to our Add new plugins page, updraft plus and the keywords. And it's actually not going to be in the top left this time it's going to be one more over right here, updraft plus backup plug-in, install now. And then when you click Activate, and then once we activate it asks you to set it up. We're not going to set this up just now. We have two more plug-ins to install and then we can go in and set everything up. The next plugin that we're going to install here is called blog to the number two, social and blog to social is a pretty cool plug-in. What this does is this allows you to syndicate your blog content throughout the entire Internet. So what you'll do here is we'll hook up all of your external social media accounts. And you can sort of look up Twitter, Medium, Facebook, Reddit, anything that you want. You can actually hook up to that. And with one click after you write a post on your website, it'll blast it out throughout the whole internet automatically. We're going to install that and then we're going to activate it. Again. Same thing. It should show up right over through here. Now the last plugin that we're going to set up on our website isn't actually available on the WordPress backend. It's called WP rocket and there's a button for it right below this video. If you click that button, you're gonna be taken over to WP Rockets website. So I'm going to head on over there. I'm going to head on over there. Now, if you click on that button, it's gonna take you to this screen. Now what WP rocket does is it caches your website. So again, this is something also to increase page load speeds, which will ultimately increase your rankings, your traffic, and the money that you make. Wp rocket is a paid tool, but it's very cheap. It's only like $39 a year. But in my opinion, the website traffic that that extra speed brings is well-worth the cost. So we come up here, we're gonna go right up here too by WP rocket. And as you see here, it's $49 a year for one website. Or we're going to click on that, enter all your information and create an account. Now I actually have an account I'm going to upgrade to an extra website now. All right. So I just upgraded my WP rocket is subscription so that I can now show you how to install it. Basically you just click this orange button here. It'll download the plugin file. Then we head back on over to our Add new plugin page and we click Upload plugin, choose the file. And when she was a WP rocket. And we just install. Once it gets installed, we have to click the Activate button. And then once it gets activated, we will see WP rocket down here on the bottom. And now we have all of our plugins installed on our website correctly. In the next video, I'm gonna show you how to go ahead and set most of them up, everything but the theme. That way our website is running smoothly. When we do start creating content, we can just forget about all the back-end stuff. See you in the next video.
8. Configuring Your Theme & Plugins: Hey, what's going on, guys? And welcome back. In this video, we're going to set up all of the plug-ins that we installed in the last lesson. So if you haven't installed all of your plugins into your website yet, go back and do that. Because if you don't, this lesson's not gonna make any sense. So with that said, let's hop back on over to our website and start setting things up. All right, so we're back here in our WordPress backend. I'm going to go on the left side here. We're going to go to plugins and we're going to Installed plugins. And this is gonna show us all the plugins that we already have installed. First thing that I like to do is go right down the right side here and enable auto updates for everything. Now I'm sure there's some IT people that want to slap me right now just for doing automatic updates, but I don't care. I want to do this to be passive and I haven't had that many problems by going automatic updates. So we're gonna come in and we're just gonna click down the, down the right side. Enable auto updates for all or at least everyone that we can. All right, so after we have auto updates turned on, we're gonna we're just work down each plugin and we're going to set them up. And now a schematic, we've done this, we did this in a previous lesson, blog to social will hop in here with settings. I'll show you how this works. First thing we're gonna do here, we're gonna setup our time zone. After we set up our time zone, we come over here to where it says social media networks. So if you go over here, you'll see a list of all of this support and social networks. And then down here on this blue button, this is how you can connect them all. Now I don't actually have any social setup for this website yet, so I can't show you how to integrate them, but it's really as simple as just adding a profile, adding a profile, adding your username. Here I'll show you later, just click Add Profile, login, login to the social network that you want to add. And then it will just link the two of them up. The last thing you can do with this, with this plugin is you can actually set your time and check the best time to post. And you can set it so that it only shares when it's the best time to post. And then here you go. You can see this. It'll show you, it'll show you when over here, which I thought was pretty cool. So that's it for blog, the social. Coming back on over to our list of plug-ins, we've already done a magnify, insert headers and footers. There really isn't much to do there. Jetpack, we've already set up PHP compatibility checker. We're not going to need to do that until we actually upgrade WordPress, which could be in a couple of weeks, could be in a couple of months, could be tomorrow. We don't know when when WordPress updates come out. Rank Math, this will be something that we use inside of our posts. Nothing left to do inside of really simple SSL, thrive art, all the Thrive product leads. We're gonna do this last. Okay, as far as WP rocket is concerned, there's a couple little settings that we're going to have to go and change. So let's head on over to WP rocket. And then right off the bat, you're going to see this little red thing up here that says endurance caches currently enabled. It will conflict with WP rocket cash. So what we're gonna do here, we can just click here at Settings General. Or if you don't see this, whatever your settings, we can click down here on general and go all the way to the bottom, you see the endurance cash. We're going to move this to level 0. Save that. Then we're gonna go right back to WP rocket. And that's gone. The one thing that I want to do here is go down here on the sidebar and WP rocket click on Media. And we're going to turn lazy load, lazy load on. What the lazy load does is lazy load is not going to load the full web page right away. So if someone clicks on to your article or someone clicks on your website, it's not going to load all the images until they actually scroll that far down the webpage. This will help boost your site loading times and also boost your search rankings. So we're going to enable this for iframes, videos and images. And now if you're using a magnify, you want to enable the web P caching. If you're not using a magnify, you're probably not going to have this option. And then after we're done with that, we'll just hit Save Changes. And now WP rocket is all set up. Now back on over to the Installed plugins page. This is where we're going to set up our backup. Now. Hop in here and we're going to setup settings on the updraft plus. Now once we get into updraft plus one and click on the Settings here and we're going to define where we want our site backed up to. Now I like to set one up here daily. Set these up here daily. Now on the bottom here, these are just all different web-based storage, depending upon whatever you have, you're going to set this up yourself. So I'm going to set mine up off camera because there's a little bit of passwords and personal information on there, but I'm gonna go set up. I have a Google Drive. All right. After you've created your backup, you're gonna be taken back to the screen. I use Google Drive. And now it's going to say success, I've authenticated my Google Drive account and now I have it set that every single day, my website, it's going to be backed up. So that way if for whatever reason I lose my data, I don't have to start from scratch. There's one or two more settings that we need to set up before we can get to our theme. So now back into WordPress. We're gonna go here to settings. And then once we're inside settings, when it come down here to permalink going on the permanent. So what this is going to do is this is going to change the default URL structure of your site. Now it defaults that day in name, so it'll have your domain plus the data that post slash the name of the post. Google hates this. You know, users hate this because nobody cares what date the post was done. So if you want something for SEO and you want Google to recognize things easily, just come right down here. Click post name. So now it's going to have your domain slash or post. And that's it. Come down here, click Save Changes. And then the next thing that we're gonna do is head on over to the reading tab. And then on your reading settings. Right here which says for each post and a feed include a summary what this is going to do if you, if you leave it, it defaults to full text. If you leave it on the default at full text, when somebody clicks on a category and your website and they see posts on a page, they're going to see the full post on that page. And you really don't want that because then your page is going to be four miles long. If you leave it to a summary, it'll shorten every post and it'll be more manageable for the reader. Put that click Save Changes. Same thing. And then the last one here we're going to come into here as discussion or to go into that setting. Click on Discussion and up here where it says default post settings. I discourage people from allowing me to comment. I'm not going to allow comments on my website because I find it that's where most of the spam ends up. People put some really crazy links, especially in the beginning before your site really has much authority. So for now I'm just going to uncheck and disallow comments so people can't comment on my website. And then these are all, these are all comments settings. But if you don't, if you don't allow comments, you don't have to worry about that. So I'm going to come all the way down here, click save changes. I'm going to save the themes for the next lesson just to keep this one small and manageable. So I will see you in the next video where we actually set up our theme, Hey, what's going on, guys, and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you how to set up and configure your thrive theme. That way your website looks nice and clean. So without any fluff, Let's get right into the video. All right, so we're going to log into our WordPress backend here. I'm going to assume that you already have your thrive theme installed. If you haven't go back to a previous video and install it, obviously are gonna come down here to the left side where it goes into thrive dashboard. We're going to come into here where it says thrive theme builder. Click on there. If it's your first time going into thrive themes, it should take you automatically to the theme builder wizard. If not, I'm going to show you how to get there to make setup very, very simple. So if you aren't taken to the theme builder wizard right away, you're going to see this little dashboard here from Thrive or to click on Open wizard here on the top-right corner. And that's gonna take us over to the wizard. Obviously, as you can see, I've already gone through the wizard and set up my site. You have it. You're going to go right up here on the left side, start up here with your logo and you're going to work your way down the left side of the screen. So using a logo, you see here recommended size 250 pixels by 40 pixels. If you don't already have a logo created, hop on over to Canvas, type in that custom size and work on a logo for the website. Keep it simple. Just have your brand name, a cool font that's not too hard to read and pick one color and keep going. Do not get lost making a theme and a logo. So once that's done, you're going to upload there the next site, the next step is going to be your main brand color. This is going to put it all over the website. Now for selecting your brand color, you can do a couple of things. If you know the hex code and your color, you can put it right through there or you can drag and drop using the sliders if you'll have a color that you like, but you're not sure what the hex code is. Here's a really cool Chrome extension. It's free. It's going to help you find it. That Chrome extension and appears called color Zola. See this little eyedropper up here, it's called color Zola. We click on it. And what it's gonna do, it's gonna be a little eyedropper. And then if you look up here on the top, any color that we have come across the page, it'll tell you all the color codes so you can exactly match it. So once that's done, you can actually select your brand color. Click Apply. Once you've done that, your brand color is going to bring you into your site structure. Alright, so thrive themes on my screen recording software is not playing well together. I can't show you the rest of the site builder wizard. So I'm going to skip this left side and go right to the next category. After you're done working your way down this list, you're gonna come over here to branding with the color. Click on the Theme Colors. Your default colors should pull over from the site wizard. And then your logo. Same thing should pull over from the site wizard. And your favicon is this little image up here at the top of your website tabs, you would upload them here it's 140 pixels by 140 pixels. Again, my screen recording software and thrive aren't playing well, so it's not going to pull up my favicon, but that's actually where you where you enter it there. Coming, coming down to typography. This is where you pick your fonts. When picking fonts for your website, keep it simple and keep it readable above all else, after you're done picking your fonts, you're gonna come down here to templates. And this is actually where you're going to select the layouts for each of your posts. Now the templates here, default post, default page and active homepage. These are the only real templates that you're going to have to really worry about. If this is your first time when you click Edit, It's going to ask you to choose from a bunch of different posts layouts. I'm going to show you where to find them if we go to Add New, and we're going to choose template. And again, my screen record software and thrive are not playing well together. I'll go to my website in a second and show you that out. For my, for my default page layout, I like to use Box page. And this is what that looks like. It's just the basic colored box up here with the title of the page on there. And then just the content of the page is very basic. It's all you really need for the post. I like to use the split top post layout and this is what the split top pose looks like. As you can see, it splits with your featured image. It has your title up here in this nice little graphic, and then the content is down and it's nice and rich here with the sidebar. And as for the homepage, I like to use the content-focused homepage. And this is what that page looks like. It's basically, it's a nice opt-in section here at the top together leads. And then it's just essentially listing all of your blog posts. There's another lead magnet in here that you can grab leads from. And then if you come down, it's going to categorize by subject as I add, as I add post, as I add subjects. This page is going to get longer and longer, but it's a very simple page where someone, if they, if they land on your page, they can just start reading your stuff after we're done with templates when it come down here to site speed and up here, minification and caching. If you already have WP rocket installed, this should be a little button here that says configured for WP rocket. You're gonna click that. It's going to automatically change all of the settings so that your site runs as fast as it can with WP rocket. Next one over here, image optimization, because we have a magic phi there really isn't too much to do here. And then the last thing here in speed is accelerated mobile pages. These settings are going to make sure that your website runs fast when someone's surfing Google on their phone, when you get to the pages is going to be unchecked. So you want to check to enable accelerated mobile pages and then come down and check all of these boxes, posts pages and landing pages. That way, everything runs faster on somebody's phone. And then for all these toolboxes, I'll leave them unchecked. And there you have it. Thrive themes is totally installed and now configured and set up and your website should look beautiful. All you have to do now is just start writing and fill it out with content. I'll see you in the next video.
9. SEO Basic Strategy: Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video, we're going to set up two of our most important SEO tools. One of those being the Rank Math plugin that we installed in a previous video, and the second one being Google Search Console. Now we installed Rank Math because it's going to send a lot of pertinent site information about our website over to Google to get indexed. Once Google will index our website, it'll be able to show up in search if it's relevant and if it matches certain search terms. In addition to that Rank, Math will also tell us how optimized our articles are for a given keyword. I'm going to show you how to set all of that up here in a minute. And we're going to set up Google search console because that's going to let us know how our site is doing in search. Keywords were ranking for how many times will be showing up in Google, how many people are clicking on it, so on and so forth. There are pretty simple to set up. So without any further ado, let's hop into my computer. I'll show you how to do it. All right, so before we get started, we're going to want to log it in three different places. First one's going to be our name cheap account. The second one here is going to be our WordPress backend, which is our domain name slash WP admin. And then the last spot that we're going to want to get logged in or create an account is at search dot google.com. I'll have links below this video leading directly to these websites. Now the first thing we're going to set up as our Google Search Console because it's going to make Rank Math Setup a little bit easier in order to set up your Google Search Console, all you're going to need is a Google account. So if you already have one, great, you're going to login with your existing Google account to hop into Google Search Console. Now when you get to Google Search Console, the screens probably going to be blank. So we're gonna go right up here to the top left where it says search property. Come down and click the little button here that says Add property. We're going to click on that. I'm going to add a for a fictitious website here to kinda show you the process. You're going to want to work here on the left side and domain property, because that's going to index every single page, it's on your domain name. So we're going to enter our domain name here. And then we're gonna hit Continue. Now it's going to try to verify ownership there. After it tries to verify ownership, it's going to come back to this screen. What you're gonna do now is you're gonna take a little piece of code that Google gives you and you're going to add a new text record to your DNS records over at Cloudflare. Alright, so what we're gonna do here is we're gonna grab this little Google site verification is random bit of code. We're going to click copy. And then we're going to come on over to Cloudflare. Once we're on Cloudflare, we're going to actually select the website. And then once our website is selected, when I go read up here to this blue box that says DNS, we're going to click this up here. Once we're in, there are DNS records on Cloudflare. When I click this little blue button here that says Add Record. And if you go back to Google Search Console, it's going to tell you to add a TXT record right over here. So over on Cloudflare, this little drop-down menu here, which is type of record. Click on that, scroll down. And you're going to see where it says TXT. Click on that. And where it says here for name, we're going to click the add symbol, which means it's gonna verify everything on our domain. And now here where it says content, we're going to click here, paste it. And then we're going to click Save. After we hit the save button, it's going to create a record. You'll see one on your website down here, a TXT record with the Google site verification texts right through there. When that's done, you're going to head back on over to Google Search Console. Once you come back over to Google Search Console, you're gonna click this Verify button. Once you click that Verify button, you'll get a big checkmark showing that your domain is verified. If it's not, you might have to wait up to an hour for things to propagate. After you verify your domain, you're going to be shown a screen that looks like this. Now this is going to be very intimidating at first. I don't want you to get too overwhelmed. There's only one report that I want you to worry about for right now. And this is the performance report right up top. I'll click Open Report and I'll kinda show you the kind of information you're going to learn from this. Now keep in mind this might take a while to start giving you data because it might take you a little bit of time for your website to get indexed in Google and start showing up in search. Now I've already added a couple of articles so that you have data and I'm not showing you a bunch of zeros. But what you'll see here, as you can see, daily impressions is how many times your site is shown up in Google search clicks as the amount of times that people have clicked on it. So you'll see how many times you've shown up, how many times people have clicked onto your website, your average click-through rate, and your average position in search. And if you scroll down here, you'll see all of the actual Google searches that people put into the search bar that you showed up for. So for instance, for woodworking, I've showed up 1780 times and search, and that's brought 70 people over to my website. And if you click over here to pages, you can see where people ended up most of the time. As you can see, my Ted's woodworking review page has shown up 8800 times and searched and 70 people clicked on it. My small workshop ideas post only showed up six times. And this will give you an idea of how good performing articles versus bad performing articles. And obviously you want to make more of the articles that perform well. Don't get caught up in looking at this every day. This is only something that I would set up and then maybe look at once a month or so. But once we get Google Search Console setup, it's time to head back on over to our website and we're going to set up Rank Math. All right, so once we get logged into our WordPress backend, it's our domain name.com slash WP hyphen admin. You're going to see a screen that looks like this. When I come over here on the left side, click on Rank Math. And then we're gonna go into general settings. Now if it's your first time going into the Rank Math settings, you should be taken to this setup wizard. If you don't see the setup wizard, I'm going to show you how to find it and we're going to walk through it together. All right, so the Rank Math Setup Wizard is on the dashboard. We click there, you're going to see a screen like this and you'll see along the tabs up here you see Setup Wizard. Click on that. And this is going to bring you to this screen. I'm going to walk you through the advanced mode, which will give you a little bit more things to tweak than the easy mode. We'll click here, start wizard. Now with this first screen is going to help you categorize your website. You're in a come into here, click the type of website that you want, business type, you want to find something on this drop-down list that's closely related to your niche. Down here, you're going to put your brand name here for company name, and then your logo for Google. And then down here for default, social share image ad or upload file. Again, if you don't have one already, you just go over to Pexels, Pixabay, or Unsplash and find a royalty-free image and stick it in there. Once that's all done, let's save and continue. And then search console, there's very top. Remember we already hooked up Google Search Console. Once we login with our Google account, Search Console will automatically integrate with Rank Math. There's nothing more for us to do. You'll see our website right through here, come right down here and hit Save and Continue. Now for sitemap. Now what a sitemap is, it's a document that your website's going to send to Google, which pretty much tells Google all the webpages that happen on your website. This way, Google can keep everything accurately index and you'll start to rise and search rankings. Rank Math will create and send this document automatically. So when we're on the sitemap page here, make sure that Sitemaps is enabled. Include the images and include all of your posts types here. And same thing that you want to have your categories. Make sure this is all checks. Click, Save and Continue. Now as far as different tweaks, empty categories and tags, I don't want them. I don't want them indexed by Google because I don't want people coming to a blank page on my website. Make sure that box is checked. No follow external links and leave that unchecked and then open external links in a new tab and window. Yes, that's good. If I link if I link to an outside source on my website, I want to keep my website open, hit Save and Continue. And there it is. We're all done. Now Rank Math is set up and configured. Now I'm going to show you what it looks like inside of a post. Okay, so to show you how Rank Math works with posts, we're going to go up here on the left side, click on posts, click on All Posts, and it'll bring you over to this screen. As you can see here, I've already written a couple of posts for the website and our SEO details should show up here on the right side. These numbers here out of a 100 is the general overall SEO score. How optimize the post is for the keyword that you've picked. So let me show you how it's going to look inside the post itself. So you've got your post title up here. You've got all of your paragraphs where you work. You've got all of your little subheadings here and then you just kinda write your article. Then on the right side of the screen over here. Normally you're going to see this on WordPress. This is, normally you're going to see this sidebar here for WordPress, but for Rank Math here and click here and bring up the Rank Math sidebar. So how did you use Rank Math? You're gonna create your focus keyword here. And then as you write that article, it's going to start checking that article against all of these certain parameters. You want to make sure you have the focus keyword in the title, which is right up here, woodworking projects that cell would work in, projects that sell your keyword meta description. That's this little snippet here. You're going to notice that you'll have woodworking projects had cell, you've got woodworking projects that cell. It's also bolded here in your Meta preview. So as you write, you want to make sure that you've got as many check-marks as possible. I kind of just go through 62 characters long As, as you start writing and as you start meeting parameters, they'll check, they'll go green and then this score up here will rise. It's a pretty intuitive system. And if you can write based on those parameters, you're going to have a perfectly optimized SEO article every single time. So that completes our lesson on SEO tools. You can now write articles based on certain keywords and then you can check how they're doing inside of Google Search Console. See you in the next video. Hey, what's going on, guys and welcome back. In this video, I'm going to show you the basics of SEO keyword strategy, so that you can start getting organic visitors to your website for free. So grab a pen and paper and let's get started. Now when we're writing a blog, There's two main types of articles that we're going to write. The first are called informational articles, and the second is called Money articles. Now the money articles are pretty self-explanatory. These are articles were either you review a product, it's a list of products for people to buy. And the objective of that post is simple. You want someone to read that article, click on the affiliate link, head on over to your vendor and go buy the item so you can earn a commission. Now the problem with these articles is that they're generally based around very hard to rank for keywords because they're worth so much money, everybody targets them and competition is fierce. So instead, what we wanna do is we want to write these informational articles. These articles aren't outright trying to sell something, but instead they're trying to answer a question that's being asked. Generally centered around keywords that are much easier to rank for so someone can end up on your site. The goal for these types of articles is to answer a question that's being asked. And then at some point during that, during the article, recommend another article, which is a money article. Now let's hop into my computer and I'll show you what I mean in terms of keyword difficulty. Alright guys, so we're here on a site called Uber suggest, and this is probably the best free keyword tool that's out there. All you have to do to become a member is just signing in with a Google account and you can hook it up, but you only get three keyword searches a day if you want unlimited keyword searches, it's like 29 bucks a month. But if you're going to pay for an SEO tool, I recommend that you check out, AH, rafts. It's not cheap, but it's the best. Now once you get inspired to write an article, I want you to type in a keyword and click Search. I've already done this for a couple of keywords. So the site that I'm building and we're building in this course is a woodworking site. And as you can see, if you just type in woodworking, a lot of people are searching at every single month on Google. But if you see this SEO difficulty here at 62, that's a very hard keyword to rank for. These are very hard to rank for it because they're very, they're very broad and you have these enormous sites writing content for that keyword. So what Uber suggest does that actually offers keyword ideas that or maybe it might be a little bit easier to rank for. So if you come down here, you can see woodworking, woodworking tools projects near me. And you can see all the difficulties up here are all yellow. It's actually pretty hard to rank for all of these keywords. And it shouldn't be because they're very, they're very broad. And a lot of these, sometimes you'll have buyers intent, for instance, tools. Someone might be searching tools because they're ready to buy a tool. Same thing with supplies, same thing with a workbench. And again, everybody's going after those keywords. So the difficulty is very, very hard. But let's look at a keyword that might be a little bit more obscure woodworking projects that cell, but it's still a money keyword. As you can see, it's not searched as much, but that's because it's a much more specific keyword. This is someone who is looking to create a project that they can sell later on. As you can see, instead of being 60 to the SEO difficulty is 44, a little bit easier, but still very hard to rank for. So we're going to use the, use the tool. We're going to come down here. And now you can see a whole bunch of different variations on it. And if you look down here, search difficulty, 44, 44, and 43. But down here we've got one here that's 21, literally half as hard to rank for how to sell woodworking projects. That's not a bad keyword to go after. But as you can see here, it's not searched enough. It's only a 140 times a month. Now when you're starting a niche website and starting a blog, you should be targeting what's called long tail keywords. Those are these types of keywords that are kinda very specific in their inquiries. And there's searched less than 1000 times a month. That's pretty much all you're going to rank for as a brand new website. So that's what you should be targeting. So again, this 20 one's a good, we would write this down as a keyword, as a keyword that we could target. Now let's look at another keyword. It might be a little bit more specific. Is it cheaper to buy or build a shed? Again, SEO difficulty is getting a little bit lower, but also search volumes down at 210, again, because it's very, very specific. And someone someone's considering buying or building a shed, That's kind of a unique person. So if we come down here, you've got the same. All kinds of keyword variations are all about the same to rank for. Now let's look at another keyword. How to bend? Would this keyword is more of an informational keyword because they're not asking about a specific product. They're looking to find a process and learn how to do something. This is something that you might want to target as a newer website. Now if you look down here, it's the last 2900 and search volume and SEO difficulty is still up at 54. If you look here, paid difficulties, easy. If you were to run an ad, you'd probably get some really, really cheap results. We're not looking at running ads. We want to come down here to keyword variations. How to bend would hear is 54. But if you get a little bit more specific, how to bend would steam or had it been Woodward steam? It gets a little bit easier. Same thing we had to bend a would people do actually search that. I don't know how you would work that into something, but that's literally has the keyword search difficulty of seven. These are the most basic bare-bones concepts of SEO. Seo itself is an enormous topic that you could do an entire course on by itself. In fact, I just took Austin Armstrong's course. There's a link below this video where you can go check it out. His whole business is SEO and growing websites for businesses. So if you wanna get tons and tons of free traffic, go check out his course. Again, I'll drop a link below the video if you want to check that out. And that brings us to the end of the program. You now have a website that's 100% set up, ready to go. All that's left to do now is to start writing articles and start filling it out. I hope you enjoyed it and you've got a lot of value out of it because I had a lot of fun teaching it. Take care.
Dominic Bavaro, Full-Time YouTuber & Digital Marketer
